Let this be a notice to all concerned: the hypertext found
poetry project Hi Ma’am Sir, published in PDF as It will be the same/but not quite
the same., is no more. It has been deleted from its blog and Mediafire
folder as an effort to comply with a cease & desist letter sent by the
lawyers of Anvil Publishing and Noelle Q. de Jesus & Mookie
Katigbak-Lacuesta, the editors of the anthology Fast Food Fiction Delivery,
who have accused me of copyright infringement and threatened me with up to
PhP600,000 in fines and imprisonment of up to twelve years.
Hi Ma’am Sir is a work of literary criticism. It is a part of
what aims to be a multimedia critical response to the short story anthology Fast
Food Fiction Delivery. The first part of the critical response is the
essay “Nutrition Facts: Always Look at the Label,” a microreview focussing on what
I perceive to be the anthology’s lack of an acute curatorial framework. HMS was
the second part of this critical response. It was meant to demonstrate what I think
is a flattening of aesthetics, politics, language, and form in contemporary
English-language short story writing in the Philippines.
Here is how HMS worked: I went through the
anthology and copied four sentences per story – specifically the first and last
sentences, and two random sentences somewhere in between. Sometimes a sentence
would have five words, sometimes ten. Some sentences were around fifty words
long, and a few were made up of a single word. I typed them all out in four rows
and encoded a hypertext machine in Javascript to generate random combinations
of what amounted to roughly two hundred and seventy two sentences, which I
predicted would come up with new stories expressing coherence despite their disparate
origins.
HMS was also intended to be a continuation of my critical and
creative practice: one of my main branches of critical and creative exploration
of the last ten years is what I call drawing
the infinite from the finite, a development of my interest in Constrained
Writing. For every project that I do, I give myself strict, pseudo-mathematical
rules to guide their creation. For HMS, the rules were to gather
roughly two hundred and seventy two sentences from sixty eight stories, have
them randomly assemble in groups of four sentences each, potentially resulting in
upwards of twenty million new stories.
I maintain that HMS is well within the territory of
Fair Use. I maintain that the process from Fast Food Fiction Delivery to Hi Ma’am
Sir was thoroughly transformative, resulting in absolute, doubtless,
and significant difference between the two, to the point that one will never be
confused for the other. I maintain that the spirit of the project has been and
always will be literary criticism, as exercised creatively. I maintain that I
have never earned a centavo from HMS, and I never will. The decision
to delete HMS is strictly motivated by nothing more than personal economic
realities.